How many times have you told yourself that you’re a good mom/dad or a bad mom/dad? You’ve probably done it a lot–and if you are like me, you are usually saying to yourself that you aren’t good enough.

The thought of being a good parent or a bad parent is not very useful. First, who is coming up with the classification anyway? We are all very different people and we have our individual ways of doing things, so there is no universal ideal of a good parent.

We create our own ideas of what a good parent is and what a bad parent is. And when we measure ourselves against the ideal, we forget that we made it up in our heads.

And usually we are doing some things better than other things. And parenting is so huge, that even when we do something well, there is something else that we are forgetting to do. We can’t be perfect parents all at once. It’s sort of impossible.

So we should stop telling ourselves that we are good or bad parents. It doesn’t do any good at all. It’s not the point, anyway. The point is to love our children, not to get a passing grade in parenting.

We should keep striving to be better–but we should do it for the benefit of our children, not so that we feel good about ourselves.

And in the end of it, I don’t want to be a good mom as much as I want to be an instrument in the hands of God to do what he would have me do. And that may mean forgetting about whether I am a good mom or a bad mom and just trying a little harder.